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It's great that they're getting hit for this, but who exactly is going to get that money?
Somehow, I doubt those effected will see a dime, and lawyers and government stooges are going to get it.
Justice for all my damn foot, why don't more people attack that part of the pledge?

Even if current employees don't see a dime of the damages, the ruling should affect all current and future employees who should now be better assured that they will get a competitive salary. If employers fail to compensate their employees fairly, there is now the ability to switch employers freely, like the law requires.

It's the nature of punishment. If you throw someone in jail for ten years, they're out ten years of productive, happy life, but that cost doesn't get redistributed to the victims of their crime. If you have system where inmates are put to work, then the county's getting to pocket some free labour, but that's about it.

No, what varies from state to state is whether you can require new hires to join the union. There's a difference between, "We can't hire you, you're not a union member" and "You're hired, you have to join the union now."

A group of employers representing a large portion of a sector seems to me more like the old-school industry-wide unions, which would coordinate labor action across multiple companies, and go on strike in an entire sector if demands weren't met (e.g. a simultaneous strike of all auto-workers at all companies). That's also banned since 1947, and now unions are required to individually negotiate with each employer in good faith, rather than coordinating labor action across a sector. So it seems pretty fair to

We let individuals with little power on their own to form organizations to increase negotiating power... So it must make sense to allow massive corporations to form uber-massive collectives to crush employees? Are you... Fucking insane?

Edit: I have a confusing sentence in there. When I say, "Unions can force all new hires to become union members (which amounts to the same thing)," I mean it amounts to the same thing Trepidity was saying (closed shop), not the same as what the companies are doing right now.

Unions cannot force employees to become members. They can, however, force employees to pay dues. The reason behind this is that they do not want employees to have an economic incentive to avoid the union. In some states, such as California, they cannot force you to pay the money directly to the union; you may contribute the money to a charity of your choice instead.

I can only speak on my experience with teachers' unions in Washington state, but yes they can. A teacher in WA automatically becomes an "agency fee" member of the teachers' union, must pay dues to the union, must accept the union's collectively bargained salary and benefits packages, and must go on strike when the union says to go on strike. If they become a full member (for a higher due) they get some additional benefits (liability insurance, representation, voting in the union, etc.). But as far as salary

How is this any different from a union? And if it's okay for unions to do it, why isn't it okay for companies?

Same reply as the last time this nonsense was posted. If it is Ok for a three year old kid to hit and kick an adult man as hard as possible, shouldn't it be Ok for an adult man to hit and kick a three year old kid as hard as possible?

How is it in any way the same? In a union, the employees of a single employer bargain with the employer collectively. Management of that single employer are a collective as well; they have negotiators, lawyers, all sorts of backup. A union evens the odds against the single employer's managers bargaining collectively against a single worker.

When they do poach they get slapped with lawsuits from the company they recruited from saying the person they got can't work anywhere near a computer for a number of years. So poaching really makes no sense because of the counter lawsuits.Are they going to deny that people have "critical information" and shut down the lawsuits that follow from poaching ?

California Business and Professions Code Section 16600 nullifies any contract that restrains anyone from engaging in a lawful business, profession, or trade. In other words, non-competes and non-solicits are not legal in California. CA courts have also rejected the "eventual disclosure" theory that would prevent someone from taking a job because they know trade secrets.

These "anti-compete" rules have no teeth except in a few isolated cases. My company has hired people from competitors and vice versa. Execs sometimes get all red in the face and talk about taking it to court (the same execs that poached from their competitors). The company lawyers get involved and break the bad news that there is no case. I've seen it happen enough times that it is comical.

There appear to be two exceptions: The trade secrets "rule" (have never seen this one applied) and the book of business

Yup. People sucked down this motto and believed it. The fast is that the nature of business is often contrary to the general public interest. This is why we citizens band together in the form of governments to counterbalance some of the negative side of business. No, this isn't a diatribe against capitalism. It is simple a recognition that capitalism has its weaknesses that must be addressed and reckoned with.

Put two saints in charge of a business and you will find that they begin behaving in ways that the wouldn't if they weren't in a powerful position. it doesn't make them evil. It is simply a response to the environment and the forces around them. Our gov't should place restraints in place to minimize anti-society behavior.

When Google puts in the "no poaching" agreement, it is acting in its own best interest, but not in the best interest of society as a whole. Citizens should be free to work in the best environment for them. This isn't a profit driven value. It is a freedom based value. Google is acting against that and should be slapped in the language that corporations understand -- the bottom line. The slap must be hard enough to change behavior, or else it will be deemed a cost of doing business.

And if you still think that we just need the right people in charge of companies, people with the right ethics and then everything will be perfect, you are absolutely deluded. Granted, we DO need strong ethics in those who hold power. But be damned sure that even those people will act against the interest of the rest of us.

So what's stopping someone from applying for another job? This is all about poaching: that is, the thing Microsoft did back in the day to kill Borland by making ridiculous offers to a direct competitor's employees to effectively hobble the company. How is that not evil?

If Google was sorting through their data to determine who the top Apple/Pixar/etc developers were and making them offers they couldn't refuse in an effort to stymie competiti

There is nothing stopping anyone from applying for a job on their own time, and none of this is about not hiring the competition.

Actually, from what I heard, this is also part of the agreement. Not to hire competitors employees, that apply for a job, on their own, with the company. Then, on top of that, to report to the competitor, after refusing the employee, that they attempted to apply for a job with them.

The motto is not "Do no evil," it is "Don't BE evil." That is important because a person can do a little evil now and then but still not really BE evil so long as he feels appropriately guilty afterwords (and tries to make up for it or not to continue doing it).

Not that this matters, of course. "Evil" is an ambiguous word, especially in an economic environment where everyone *must* compete over scarce resources.

Some knowledgeable sources close to the discovery process say that there is a secret clause buried in these contracts. Apparently all these companies agreed not to rouse 2000 employees in the middle of the night and herd them back to work for a cup of tea and some biscuits. But Apple found a loop hole, that this clause applies only to USA and not China. That kind of gotcha tactic upset the other players who were overheard saying, "tut, tut, it is not cricket, it is not done" in the Olde Duquesne Country Clu

When I was working a government job and was trying to go back to the private sector, I had several recruiters tell me that they couldn't hire me since the had government contracts.

In the private sector, I had seen the same as well. A company I was working for as a contractor wanted to hire me as their own employee, but their contract had a poaching clause that levied a substantial (5 figure) fee if they did so. They did do it for one of my coworkers, but he ended up leaving in less than a year so they wer

When you go with a contracting agency, it allows the company to put you to work on a trial basis without incurring costs like insurance, nor having any contractual (or emotional) bonds if they don't feel you're working out. If they do hire you, they are paying the recruitment costs to the contractor.

And as the above poster noted, with the government scenario, that's to prevent corruption with government contracts.

What's happening here is monopolistic collusion in an effort to keep w

the point is though, that those entry level engineers stuck in entry level positions couldn't use their cv to apply for more senior position in another company(because the other company wouldn't hire them because they were working for company xxx). and for the companies it's beneficial to keep the talent base at entry level positions regardless of what they're used to engineer.

I had an acquaintance who worked as a contractor for Google for a year. According to him, generally things are really rough as a contractor but get way better if they elect to bring you on as an employee.

(Of course, my story is jhust as anecdotal as the preceding one by an AC, so take both with a grain of salt or two.)

It is legal for companies to put agreements not to work for a competitor in a contract. While having a similar net effect, it's open. This is different because its collusion in restraint of fair employment. However a lot of these anti trust laws are predicated on the size of the companies involved.

"It is legal for companies to put agreements not to work for a competitor in a contract. "

They can put it in the agreement. It is, however, for the most part is unenforceable. One thing that people don't seem to realize is that if a contract is deemed to be against the public interest, it is null and void. Non-competes fall in this category except for some specific exceptions.

Not just unenforceable, but actually prohibited in California (where all this anti-poach activity is going on)..However, there are devious ways to achieve the same result: Allege that the leaving employee possesses trade secret knowledge that will inevitably be disclosed. Whether or not that's true (and the courts tend to say it's not), the threat of litigation accompanying your hiring that person tends to have a chilling effect on the whole thing.

WOW, wow and wow. So now the little man is the greedy one!!! How....funny. What is next? The little one is paying less taxes than the BIG one? Oh, yes, i almost forgot: WHITE IS BLACK AND BLACK IS WHITE.

Just as businesses face real incentives to get as much work out of employees for as little money as possible, employees face real incentives to get as much money out of employers while contributing as few hours as possible.

While there are some people who are satisfied with "enough," it is human nature to want more.

No, no. It's ok to do that to the lower classes, because this keeps costs down, which lets the upper classes get more. This increase in wealth will eventually trickle down to the lower classes in the form of more shitty, underpaid jobs. Because, you know, companies just hire people out of the goodness of their hearts when they have more money. It has nothing to do with the level of demand at all.

I see your point, but you sort of speak against yourself by bringing up the CEO pay example. After all, isn't the complaints about CEO pay by everyone just a plea for someone to collude to keep people with certain rare skills (Executive Management) from making as much as the market will bear? You may not think much of CEOs, but it's the same thing. The only difference is that you either simply don't like CEOs or you devalue their skill set, and while there are definitely some sociopaths out there in the CEO position, I'd argue that it is a position you need some very stong skills to do successfully.

In any event, people with rare skills are not the general worker population that unions and such would be working for. Unions tend to cut down people who try to use their skills to rise above the norm in terms of pay and benefits, instead, they usually insist on a seniority basis for any sort of increased compensation.

I'm not saying that I like that CEOs make as much as they do, but I often wonder if it even matters how much they make. Do lottery winners suddenly become threats to society with that money, simply because they have a lot of it? Honestly, this country isn't going to fall apart because some people make more money than others, it's going to fall apart due to our attitudes about what is good to do with that money, and that's something that reaches right down into the "lower" classes as well. We seem to care more about how much someone else makes and pay no attention to what we do with what we do make. After all, isn't that what the mortgage crisis was all about? People taking out loans they simply couldn't afford, just because some loan officer told them it was okay for them to spend as much money as they could?

There's always going to be someone like a CEO out there. If you abolish them, then the rich people will be the political leaders or the union leaders. If you abolish money or private ownership, then the rich people will be the Leaders of the Revolution. Pointing at these people is like pointing at the sun for being too hot and wondering why someone doesn't just take that big ball of gas down a notch.

Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt were actually good friends for a while. Schmidt was even on Apple's board, until he had to leave when Google bought Android and it created a conflict of interest. That was one of the reasons Jobs was so mad about Android -- he felt like it was busting up his friendship.

Incidentally, if you want to help me test a hypothesis, try paying attention to the media coverage of this story to see how much the MPAA-owned media cover this story with Google as the principal antagonist/coordinator of the scheme and Apple as a secondary or unimportant player now that Google has gone to bat for us against SOPA, even though it was Steve Jobs [techcrunch.com] who started the ball rolling on this whole no poach thing. Pay special attention to News Corp coverage (e.g. Fox News and the Wall Street Journal) -- my hypothesis is that Murdoch has it in for Google now and is executing a campaign against them. Let's see if I'm right.

You just don't get it. If they hired from each other, the employees who changed jobs get 20% or greater pay increases with each jump. Because they are paid more their "peers" demand more and they get 10% or more pay increases. Eventually college students, seeing how the pay scale is rising, go into the field, causing an adequate employee supply and reducing the upward pressure on pay. The pay scale for these employees would be significantly higher than it is today. By avoiding this cycle, the companies

Changing jobs may get you a salary increase, but it doesn't come without costs. In reality this creates at some point an equilibrium. An employee who bounces from one job to the next is not likely to be viewed as that attractive to an employer unless they have a very special and unique talent. In that case, why shouldn't they be allowed to use it as part of their negotiation? Sports teams confront this issue all the time. They make contracts to lock people in. This would be far preferable arrangement

Absolute not-hire. Even if the employee came to the company on their own, they couldn't extend an offer.

Further, both situations are completely shitty, as both represent a cartel attempting to exert their power to control the price of a resource for the rest of the market. There is absolutely no reason why any of this shit should be allowed to stand.

It is short sighted to assume that this is just about well paid programmers. Employment law applies to all corporations. If it were legal for high value employers like Google etc. to conspire to drive down wages, then it would also be legal for low value employers to conspire and do likewise. It could easily be the case that, in certain geographic regions or areas of industry, there would only be a few potential employers for certain classes of worker, and collusion between these employers could drive wages down to minimum wage, or even down to an unliveable wage for places that don't have a minimum.

The market for employees is just like any other functioning market. Companies colluding to reduce competition in the marke makes the market less efficient. If you are an economist, or just a person who favors capitalism and competitive markets, then you should be against this.

I'm sorry, but 10x average salary. Hmm, I'm an engineer. Average salary is somewhere around 45K a year. I don't know any that make 450K a year. I would say 2x isn't uncommon, and some of the highly compensated might make 3x average, but 10x, no.

But then comes the muddying of the water. First, we do a job that very few can do. The drop out rate in school is >70% of the people who attempt to earn the degrees. Further than that, I don't have a number, but a fairly large percentage enter the work world, and discover they can't handle it. This leaves a very small number of people who can actually produce as an engineer. Toss in that EVERYTHING needs to be engineered. Whether due to nature of the product or due to regulation, this is just a fact of life. This creates high demand and low supply, which leads to our seemingly high pay.

But wait, now for such a needed profession, then it turns out, we're actually not highly paid, even relative to what we do. For some odd reason, especially in tech, the companies are always locals with high cost of living. This means, comparing the salary of an engineer to a farmer in the mid-west isn't really fair. Compare an engineers salary to the average in the bay area, that'd be more fair. And then of course, the average american works on average of 38-39 hours a week. The typical engineer looks at 40 hours longingly. We're all salaried employees, which means we don't get overtime, and 50 per week is fairly normal. My last job, I would regularly crack 65 and even had a couple months where I was averaging 80 hours a week. People who've never worked 80 hours really can't grasp it. I never thought 80 would be much until I did it. that's 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. You literally get up, get dressed, drive to work, work, drive home, eat dinner, get ready for bed, and sleep. That's it. For double, or MAYBE triple the national average salary. And then you throw in companies that try to hinder people trying to improve their lot a little.

You'll undoubtedly say "well, if you don't like it, then leave", but that mentality ignores some very important factors. Engineers are an odd assortment. First, we typically genuinely love what we do. We don't mind working 50 hours a week, because we love it, but that doesn't mean we don't get exhausted. Also, our work ethic is typically top notch, and we have a huge amount of pride in what we do. We take ownership in what we create and it hurts us to abandon it. We also put up with an amazing amount of BS. A lot of companies understand this, and use it to their advantage to basically turn us into slaves. Yes, not in the literal sense, but by taking advantage of our idiosyncrasies, they effectively do.

And the good news is that to be competitive with Chinese workers employees everywhere will soon have to get used to working 80 hr/wk for about $22.00 per day. Most corporations like Apple, which essentially employ Chinese under conditions that approach slavery, have figured out this is the easiest way to maximize profits and that is all that capitalism is about. Apple admitted to this, when they officially claimed in testimony to Congress that their role in society was not to benefit society as a whole, b

" I don't understand the urge to compare the salary for jobs that take a high degree of training and skill with with the average salary,"

Perhaps it comes from the realization that in actuality even the janitor is as equally indispensable to the operation of any corporation as is the CEO and although may not be paid as much, should be recognized with a sufficient measure of dignity and salary necessary to keep civilization stable rather than heading pell-mell toward the dissolution of civilization because a

Shouldn't the best players in the league be paid more? Even sports teams have what are called free agents. If companies want to retain employees they need to get them to sign a contract that stipulates not only the amount of their pay, but also the duration. From a business perspective this would create more stability than trying to engage in non-poaching deals.

I see nothing inherently immoral or unethical about this; it just makes good business sense.

I'm sorry, that makes you a complete and utter pile of shit. I don't give a shit what "business sense" it makes, they are colluding to artificially limit the market for that employee's skills.

The people who write comments on here obviously have never owned a business in the real world.

And go fuck yourself. Why should anyone have to "own a business in the real world" in order to see that this is not right, and is another example of Big Business attempting to use their size and power to exert more control on the rest of us?

Because all of the employees that get a lower salary due to the agreement are also consumers. It also indicates that the companies are not interested in competing with each other to produce the best products by recruiting the best talent.

It is not that so much as it is bad for the employees. It is the same as if all the tech giants went into an agreement together to lower all of their workers wages (since they used a monopoly position to do it they could force a lot of people to work for less money). And while this is less nefarious sounding, no poaching does lower wages, significantly.

It’s not about the consumers, it’s about the employees. Companies want to keep their payroll down so they conspire not to hire the other’s employees. Dampens completion and thus pay.

On the flip side, I have seen a rival company hire away whole teams. All of a sudden a company had a great line of business and the next day it’s across the street. Sometimes it has been a key operations department (i.e. the department that keeps the companies’ door open, not one that makes any profit.) It can be quite stressful for a company.

In my line of business, if somebody wants to poach another person’s team (Such as all of the brokers in a office or a analyst team) the only answer is more money. On the other side, if one want’s to poach a operations team, you got to leave enough people so the company can run. Not quite fair that the 2 types of people are treated different - it's jus the way the cookie crumbles.

I'm for competition and against collusion, but that's supposed to be about the way companies sell products. How is poaching employees supposed to be good for the consumer?

To be a consumer, one needs to be a producer first (credit notwithstanding). Now, if there is a very limited number of buyers for what one produces (oligopsony) then the price you could sell your goods or services would tend to be lower.

I guess you could say it isn't, but the threat of workers being poached (in *some* sense) is what keeps wages from falling to zero in the first place, protecting the worker.

It happens in a different form for lower-wage workers, like in fast food or janitorial services: employers have to pay enough of a wage that the workers won't flee and go to someone else who offers more.

In high-wage tech jobs, it more often takes the form of some company actively seeking out the worker and making a competitive offer.

Either way, "competition" for workers is what keeps wages reflecting relative scarcity of that kind of labor (with a ton of caveats I won't go into, obviously. And whether or not you agree with the idea, antitrust is intended to prevent anti-competitive behavior, whether regarding consumers or workers.

I guess you could say it isn't, but the threat of workers being poached (in *some* sense) is what keeps wages from falling to zero in the first place, protecting the worker.

You exaggerate a bit. The average wage you would get in a world without the threat of workers quitting or getting hired away is basically W = (R + T) / 40 + U, where W = annual wages, T is the cost of training the worker, R is the cost of providing the basic necessities of the future worker from birth to the start of their career, and U is the annual upkeep of the worker (food, shelter, water, clothing, health care, transportation to/from work and stores). The '40' is the length of the worker's career, generally assumed here to be something like 24-64.

Why does everything have to be about the consumer? What about the worker? Poaching employees can be good for the worker because it represents a larger market for their skills. Without it, their potential market is artificially closed down.

It's GOT to be illegal. Companies must compete (in terms of wages, working conditions, other benefits) for workers in order to have a working system. Otherwise, you sign up for Google and they can treat you however they like, they know none of the other companies will take you off their hands, so why pay you more?

this isn't about monopoly power; it's about workplace discrimination. If I apply for a job, it's illegal for the employer to deny me the job capriciously, including the fact that they have a side agreement with their competitors not to hire me.

Even worse, parts of the allegations verge on blackballing: it's alleged that when an employer from company A applied to a job at company B, where A & B were part of the "no-poaching" collusion agreement, company B would not only refuse to hire them to avoid poaching, but actually rat the employee out to company A, telling them that this employee tried to apply for a job.

Actually, there are limits to how a person can be terminated even in at-will states. There is a long list of things an employer can do that will open them up for litigation or regulatory enforcement. "at-will" does not equal "capricious";

The Civil Rights Act of 1964This legislation prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, gender or national origin. The law exempts religious organizations. If the reason for firing is arbitrary but is not included in a protected class, the firing is legal. For example, an employer cannot fire a woman for being Cambodian but can fire her because he does not like women who wear large, golden earring

Actually, in the US, they can deny you the job capriciously. If you go in for an interview, and they deny you the job because they just don't feel like hiring you, that's legal.

What's not typically legal is failing to hire you because of race, gender, religion (except if the organization is a religious group), age (although this one is often violated), marital status, military service (although lack of military service could be relevent), national origin, or union activity. So if they either specifically ma

Another story on this case seemed to say that it was more than just not head hunting each other's employees. That story, as I recall, indicated that the agreement included not hiring people who worked at one of the other companies who applied for a job.

Of course it should be. People should not be locked into one employer just because any potential employer in their field has a No Poach agreement with their current employer. It seems ridiculous now, but as these companies get larger, and their reach and influence gets larger, it's only going to get worse.

If things like this are allowed to stand, how long will it be before you're basically locked into an employer for life? People laugh at the rhetoric that gets thrown around these days, like indentured servants, or serfs, but really, what else could you call employees in a situation like this? And what recourse would employees have? Leave their field entirely? Or the deliberately ignorant "Start your own business, then!!" that is thrown around whenever anyone complains about their employer these days?

It never ceases to amaze me how much the common man will fight against his own self-interest. In what possible way could these No Poach agreements benefit anyone that is not a C-level executive at any of these companies?

Ah, I'll remember that next time there's any discrimination lawsuit. Guess "Just go get a job somewhere else, then!" is number two on the list of "reasonable excuses" for abhorrent behavior by major corporations these days...